Word: havana
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...studio apartment is hidden away amid the rambling old Mafia hotels and quiet leafy parks of Vedado, Havana's modern midtown district. Like many a Cuban home, it has a dusty attic quality, the poignancy of a well-cared-for poverty. The apartment's contents are fairly typical. A high shelf has been turned into a home-made altar, crowded with Catholic icons. Below is a shelf stuffed with the works of Spinoza, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler. Between the two is a huge black-and-white TV set on which, boasts its owner, he can sometimes catch programs from...
...qualities that hit a visitor most forcibly on arrival in Cuba are its beauty and its buoyancy: the crooked streets and sunlit Spanish courtyards of Old Havana; the chrome-polished 1953 Chevrolets that croak along tree-lined streets past faded but still gracious homes of lemon yellow, orange and sky blue; the warm breeze that comes off the sea at night. In contrast to the gray functionalism of other Communist countries, Cuba is, after all, a decidedly Caribbean island of gaiety and light. On balmy nights, the sound of rumbas pulses through Coppelia, the central park, where brightly dressed teenagers...
...education, both free, have improved considerably since the days of Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Grinding poverty has been erased. Drugs and prostitution, which flourished when the place was a raffish offshore playground for Americans, have now gone underground. But in the face of those advances, the man in the Havana street is still unable to speak or travel as he pleases. Money is more than ever in desperately short supply. "Cuba is suffering an economic crisis of massive proportions," says a foreign diplomat. "Here is a country with no free press, no opposition parties, no capital flight, a controlled economy...
...Some people take photos, fix jalopies or do typing on the side; others simply try to resell the goods they manage to procure. The rampant finagling is only encouraged by a bureaucracy with so many hands that none is likely to know what the others are doing: in a Havana telephone directory, the list of ministries takes up 77 pages...
...helping to steer restricted American technology to the Cubans and Soviets, not to mention repressing his own people. Yet Noriega, the Commander of the Panama Defense Forces and de facto dictator since 1983, has been adept at exploiting his country's strategic position. Although he openly cuddles up to Havana, he has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the CIA, and his country plays host to the headquarters of the 10,000 troops of the U.S. Southern Command...